14 October 2012

I had been vaguely aware that the proposed cull of badgers in the UK was controversial, but had not fully realised that the evidence against it was so overwhelming. That was confirmed by this letter in the Observer today, with some of the top scientists in the country coming out against it, and this short video, which usefully explains the issues and why the cull will make things worse.

As a result, I have been moved to send a missive to my MP, using the wonderful WriteToThem service. Here's what I've written:

I am writing to you to express my deep
concern over government plans to cull badgers.

As a Londoner, this is not a topic I
normally concern myself with. I naturally have no objection to
farmers seeking to minimise losses to their herds from serious
diseases such as TB. However, as the letter in today's Observer (at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2012/oct/14/letters-observer)
from 30 leading professors with expertise in this area points out, a
badger cull is likely to make the situation worse, not better.

The reasons why are well explained in
this video (http://justdosomething.org.uk/badgersmatter), which
includes a contribution from Sir David Attenborough among others:
shooting badgers will lead to a dispersion of them from their current
locations. If any of them are infected with TB, they will carry that
with them to new areas. A far better solution would seem to be the
use of vaccination of badgers against TB, something that is
apparently already efficacious, but which could benefit from funding
to refine.

Given the overwhelming – indeed,
near-unanimous – view that the badger cull will not only fail to
achieve its goals, but will actually exacerbate the situation, I am
disturbed that the Government is nonetheless planning to proceed with
it. It is crucially important that policy be evidence-based, not the
result of pandering to groups that have apparently taken an
unscientific view for reasons best known to themselves. I would be
grateful if you could convey my concerns to the relevant minister,
along with a request that the cull be suspended and more efficient
and humane methods deployed instead.

13 October 2012

Back in July, I wrote about a consultation on net neutrality from the EU, entitled
On-line public consultation on "specific aspects of transparency,
traffic management and switching in an Open Internet". Just to remind
you, here's the background:

As Techdirt stories regularly report, governments around the world,
including those in the West, are greatly increasing their surveillance
of the Internet. Alongside a loss of the private sphere, this also
represents a clear danger to basic civil liberties. The good news is
that we already have the solution: encrypting communications makes it
very hard, if not entirely impossible, for others to eavesdrop on our
conversations. The bad news is that crypto is largely ignored by the
general public, partly because they don't know about it, and partly
because even if they do, it seems too much trouble to implement.

In the wake of the Twitter joke trial fiasco, which saw Paul Chambers dragged through the courts for two years before being acquitted, the UK's Director of Public Prosecutions announced that there should be an "informed debate"
about the boundaries of free speech for social media. That really
can't happen soon enough, as the UK continues to arrest and punish
people for the crime of posting stupid and tasteless messages online.
Here are some of the latest developments.

Back in August, I urged
people to respond to the consultation on the truly dreadful Draft
Communications Bill, aka Snooper's Charter. Obviously, I wasn't alone
in doing that: many organisations concerned about the impact on civil
liberties in this country have done the same. For example, both 38
Degrees and Open Rights Group (ORG) provided suggested texts and asked
people to contact the Joint Parliamentary Committee that has been
considering the Bill - and doing rather a good job of it, I must say.

As we know, lock-in is one of the biggest obstacles to moving from
closed, proprietary formats, to open ones. But so far as I know, no one
has tried to quantify the extent to which people cling to old formats.
That makes the following piece of research useful, at least as a first stab at finding out what is really going on:

One of the reasons the copyright lobby has been able to get so far
with Net-hostile legislation like SOPA/PIPA and treaties like ACTA and
TPP is that the companies affected adversely -- both big Internet
players and smaller startups -- have failed to make their voice heard
effectively. That's finally starting to change, as Google ramps up its
lobbying efforts, and Net entrepreneurs start to get organised.

Transparency is worth having for itself, since governments often tend
to behave a little better when they know that someone is watching. But
occasionally, requests for data turn up something big and totally
unexpected because someone failed to notice quite what the information
provided implies.

Linux went from being a cool personal hack in a bedroom to software
that would eventually change world just over 21 years ago when Linus
sent out his famous "Hello everybody out there using minix" message that
invited people to join in. As I noted last month, that open, collaborative approach was really quite new and proved key to the uptake and development of Linux.

In the last year I've written what some might have felt were rather too many thousand words about ACTA.
But I'd argue that it was an important moment, not least because of the
European Parliament's refusal to ratify the treaty, which was quite
unprecedented for an international agreement of this kind.

This is getting silly. Over the last year I've been warning about problems with the EU's plan to bring in a Unitary Patent system, culminating in a call to write to your MEPs a few weeks ago about an imminent vote that was taking place in the crucial JURI committee. That didn't take place, but word is that the committee vote will now take place this Thursday:

A recurrent theme here on Techdirt is the persistent lack of transparency
during the drafting of new laws or the negotiation of new treaties.
Most governments, it seems, retain the view that they know best, that
the electorate shouldn't worry about all those tiresome details being
discussed in secret backroom negotiations, and that since the public
will be able to see the result once it's all finished, what's the
problem?

It's become something of a cliché that anyone with a mobile phone is
carrying a tracking device that provides detailed information about
their location. But things are moving on, as researchers (and probably
others as well) explore new ways to subvert increasingly-common
smartphones to gain other revealing data about their users. Here's a
rather clever use of malware to turn your smartphone into a system for taking clandestine photos -- something we've seen before, of course, in othercontexts -- but which then goes even further by stitching them together to form a pretty accurate 3D model of your world:

Techdirt has been following the important story of the kidney and liver cancer drug marketed under the name Nexavar since March,
when India granted a compulsory license for the first time since
re-instating patents on pharmaceuticals. Naturally, the patent holder,
Bayer, fought back, and appealed against that decision. Now we learn from Intellectual Property Watch that Bayer has lost:

As Techdirt has reported, after a year of amazing successes, the German Pirate Party is going through something of a badpatch
at the moment. One reason is that it seems to spend more time
squabbling in public than on crafting policy documents that will win
over the public. That makes the recent appearance of proposals for
copyright reform particularly significant.

An increasing number of Open Enterprise posts are about moves to open
up government in myriad ways. That's not really surprising, since open
source clearly is a perfect match for public administrations, as are
open standards, and open data is a natural outgrowth of software
openness.

There's plenty of breathless writing about the imminent 3D-printing
revolution, but realistically, what is it likely to mean for most
people? They probably won't all be printing out their own planes, but they may well be printing out small replacement parts for goods they own. Here's an early example of that from the world of electronics, spotted by the Shapeways site:

As I've noted a couple of times,
one of the key issues that has yet to be resolved concerning the
proposed EU Unitary Patent system is which court will have the final
say. Will it be the European Court of Justice (ECJ), or the main
Unitary Patent Court? Or, put another way, will Articles 6 to 8 of the
Unitary Patent Regulation to be adopted by the Council and the European
Parliament be deleted or not? If they are removed, ultimate power rests
with the Unitary Patent Court; if they remain, the ECJ has the last word.

Levies on blank storage media are a relic of older times when copying
was a new possibility for copyright works. You no longer needed an LP
pressing plant, say, you could copy music in the comfort of your own
home, first on analog cassette tapes, then later on digital media like
CDs and MP3 players. At that time, it was easy to see each of those
copies as somehow replacing purchases, and so the argument for levies
was born: people should pay indirectly for the "lost" sales their
copying caused.

Last week, I mentioned
that I attended the Open Forum Europe 2012 conference. Preceeding it
was the first meeting of the Open Forum Academy (OFA), of which I am a
member. Here's how it describes itself:

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.